NO REGRET
I woke up before him.
The room was still dark — that specific pre-dawn dark that has a different quality from midnight dark, thinner somehow, like the night is already beginning to negotiate with the morning even though neither has announced it yet. I lay still for a moment and I looked at the ceiling and I listened to his breathing beside me and I thought about what had happened the night before with the full unguarded attention that the dark makes possible when there is nothing else requiring it.
Not with regret.
I want to be clear about that — I checked the way you press a bruise to find its edges, and there was no regret there. No part of me wished I had made a different choice or stayed in the kitchen or gone to my room when he reached for my hand. None of that.
What wa
